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‘I first spoke to Aaron Driver in February 2015’

The goal was to understand the other side of the story — of why young Canadians would be swayed by terrorist groups. Rather than rely on recollections of family and friends, Star reporter also wanted the story from the source.

Terror suspect Aaron Driver was calm, considered and polite in an interview with Allan Woods in 2015. (Facebook Photo)

'I think a lot of Canadians need to wake up and understand that we’re doing this and worse to other people in other countries,' terror suspect Aaron Driver Driver told Allan Woods, after terror attacks killed Canadian military personnel.

I first found Driver, who was killed Wednesday in a confrontation with police investigating “credible information of a potential terrorist threat” in Strathroy, Ont., in February 2015. In truth, it was hard to miss him.

I began searching for young Canadians who had fallen under the sway of the terrorist group Daesh (also known as ISIS or ISIL), after a handful of young Muslims from Montreal fled their homes for Syria a month earlier.

The goal was to understand the other side of the story, to hear in these peoples’ own words why they would rather dodge bombs and bullets in a war zone than take advantage of Canada’s comforts and security.

The country was in a panic at the time. Two lone-wolf terrorist attacks had been carried out just a few months before in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, a small town south of Montreal, and on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The federal government had proposed legislation, Bill C-51, that gave authorities more powers and leeway to deal with the problems of radicalization and terrorism.

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Rather than try to piece together the motivations of an individual from Facebook posts and former friends’ recollections after they flee to Syria, are arrested or are killed, I wanted to hear about it before the fact and from the source.

The quest quickly came to focus on the Twitter account of a certain “Harun Danyal,” an English-speaking Daesh supporter who was following, or was followed by, a number of the most popular or prolific terrorist types on the group’s preferred social media site. What hooked me was the not-so-cryptic location he had listed on his profile page: “North of you.”

Looking further, I turned up references online that this Harun Danyal had made going back years that talked about hockey sticks, about growing up in a military family, about his love of video games. But he also shared his thoughts on the Muslim faith in Internet forums, asking questions and sometimes sharing his discoveries. On one site he defended sharia, a strict legal interpretation of the Islamic faith, saying that stoning was a punishment for both men and women — not just females.

There were sympathetic elements, too. On Reddit, he wrote a long post about having moved to Winnipeg from London, Ont., and asked other users for advice on how to meet new friends in a new town, making no reference at all to his religion.

I eventually sent Driver an anonymous message on one site asking him to check a longer, more detailed and private message that I had written to him on another account. In that message, I explained who I was and what I wanted, but I thought it a long shot and never really expected to hear from him again.

I was shocked that he responded — quickly — to my request. His conditions were that I not identify him by his real name, not mention that he lived in Winnipeg and that he had been raised in London and not share my journalistic materials with the authorities. He said he was concerned for the privacy of his siblings as well as for his father, who was serving in the Canadian military.

But Driver, who was clearly computer savvy and often a source of security advice for his fellow Daesh supporters on Twitter, had no regard for his own safety. As he told me during our eventual two-hour interview over an encrypted Internet-based telephone service that he had studied carefully, selected and instructed me how to use: “The government already knows who I am.”

“Up until a certain point I was very anonymous about how I went about my online activity. But I made one mistake and they caught onto that,” he explained.

Driver said Canadian spies began contacting his family members and an old friend after he had re-tweeted a link to a Daesh video that featured Ottawa convert John Macguire from somewhere in the territory claimed by Islamic State, as Daesh is also known, calling on people to take inspiration from the deadly terrorist attacks in October 2014 in St-Jean and Ottawa.

But the meeting with authorities had not changed his behaviour or activities, he said. “I’m not doing anything illegal and I haven’t done anything illegal yet. I haven’t called for violence against anyone or anything like that.”

In fact, Driver was even critical of some of the shocking and horrific violence that has become the hallmark of the terrorist group he is alleged to have supported. The videos and other propaganda, might draw psychopaths and murderers to the religion rather than those who had come to support the group based on the principles of their faith.

And yet, he defended the acts of retribution, be they torture beheadings, executions and burning people alive as a gruesome but ultimately necessary reminders that western militaries are inflicting the same pain on Syrians and Iraqis.

“They are showing people that this is what you are actually doing to us and so we’re going to do it back to you,” Driver said.

Throughout the interview, Driver was calm, considered and polite — not at all what I had expected. He took time to explain his beliefs and how he came to them. He shied away only from some personal details of a difficult childhood that family members would later confide included the death of Driver’s mother when he was young and the family’s suffering as a result.

His father had recalled that the family had been deeply religious, but had lost contact with other members of the local church after the death. At a young age, Driver had asked his father: “What the hell good are Christians if they can’t help you when you’re hurting?”

After bouncing around between living with his father, living with his siblings and living on his own, with all the freedoms that that entailed, Driver said he grew weary of the extreme freedom and began searching for religion. He studied the major ones and stopped when he came to Islam. In the Qur’an’s strict framework about how Muslims must live their lives, he found what he was desperately searching for.

This was no quick conversion and radicalization, though. He said he had been a Muslim for about five years, had been involved in group activities at his local mosques in Ontario. But he had found a disconnect between what he had come to believe and the sentiments and teachings he received at the mosques and in the community in Winnipeg.

In the interview, Driver defended even his most distasteful beliefs, including his assertion that the deadly terrorist attacks on Canadian soil, killing military personnel, were justified retaliation for Canada’s participation in the bomb strikes in Iraq that had begun not long before.

“(Canadians) don’t want that happening in their country. But I think a lot of Canadians need to wake up and understand that we’re doing this and worse to other people in other countries,” he said.

Although he was loud and unapologetic on Twitter, he said he kept a low profile in real life. He said he did not preach to his fellow Muslim friends and continued associating with non-Muslim acquaintances in Winnipeg. However, the investigation into his activities progressed and escalated in the following weeks.

After a lengthy front-page article about him — under the alias Harun Abdurahman — was published in the Star, followed by another article looking at the plight of his anxious and worried family, media in Winnipeg tracked down Driver, and the Muslim community in the city sought him out to offer intervention and religious counselling. But the authorities were also circling in as well.

By early March, or within weeks of those articles appearing in the Star, Driver’s father said he had been informed that his son was under constant CSIS surveillance. He was arrested in the first week of June in Winnipeg at his rented apartment. He eventually agreed to a peace bond that barred him from going on the Internet for a year and stated that there were reasonable grounds to fear he would participate or contribute to the activity of a terrorist group.

During that time, he moved to the London area to live with, or in proximity to, his siblings. He dropped off the social media radars. He was effectively silenced by the court order.

But his alleged actions serve as his last words, suggesting that little about his radical belief system changed between then and Wednesday night.

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